“The road was nearly cut in half and we had to do some extensive repairs and close the road for some time,” Yob said.

In order to further investigate the damage, the County sent civil engineers into the river in diving gear to assess the bridge and discovered something they weren’t expecting.

“This bridge is actually a 1950′s era bridge that’s supported by timber piles, those aren’t even used today,” Yob said. “Some of those timber piles have suffered some scour, or some soil erosion, from the force of the river. What we have to do now is close the bridge, drive some sheet piling [into the soil]. Once the sheet piling is in place we’ll trim the concrete in, we’ll stabilize this bridge and get it back in service."

“It does need to be fixed because a lot of traffic goes down that road,” said Ashley Rawls, who travels the road daily.

The six-week time-table is all weather dependent, but contractors also need to assess what they’re dealing with once construction begins.

“One of the issues is once we really get the sheet piling driven and be able to excavate and see what the problem is, in other words, until we start performing the surgery on the bridge, we won’t know what all the repairs will be,” Yob said.

The construction is expected to cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars and would come out of the budget for road improvements.

Crews also hope to have this construction completed before a potentially rainy Spring and the heavy tourist season.